WBANs provide communication services in the vicinity of the human body. Since WBANs utilize both MICS frequency band for implant medical applications and ISM frequency band for medical and consumer electronics (CE) applications, MAC protocols in WBAN should be designed considering flexibility between medical and CE applications. In this letter, we identify the requirements of WBAN MAC protocols and propose a WBAN MAC protocol which satisfies the requirements. In order to provide transmission flexibility for various applications, we present the dynamic CFP allocation and opportunity period. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves improved throughput and latency in WBAN environment compared with IEEE 802.15.4.

Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) is a well-known low-power design technique, which adjusts the clock speed and supply voltage dynamically to reduce the energy consumption of real-time systems. Previous studies considered the probabilistic distribution of tasks' workloads to assist DVS in task scheduling. These studies use probability information for intra-task frequency scheduling but do not sufficiently explore the opportunities for the system workload to save more energy. This paper presents a novel DVS algorithm for periodic real-time tasks based on the analysis of the system workload to reduce its power consumption. This algorithm takes full advantage of the probabilistic distribution characteristics of the system workload under priority-driven scheduling such as Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces processor idle time and spends more busy time in lower-power speeds. The measurement indicates that compared to the relative DVS algorithms, this algorithm saves energy by at least 30% while delivering statistical performance guarantees.

Set-partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is one of the well-known image compression schemes. SPIHT offers an agreeable compression ratio and produces an embedded bit-stream for progressive transmission. However, the major disadvantage of SPIHT is its large memory requirement. In this paper, we propose a memory efficient SPIHT image coder and its parallel implantation. The memory requirement is reduced without sacrificing image quality. All bit-planes are concurrently encoded in order to speed up the entire coding flow. The result shows that the proposed algorithm is roughly 6 times faster than the original SPIHT. For a 512512 image, the memory requirement is reduced from 5.83 Mb to 491 Kb. The proposed algorithm is also realized on FPGA. With pipeline design, the circuit can run at 110 MHz, which can encode a 512512 image in 1.438 ms. Thus, the circuit achieves very high throughput, 182 MPixels/sec, and can be applied to high performance image compression applications.

Introducing adaptive online data compression at network-internal nodes is considered for alleviating traffic congestion on the network. In this paper, we assume that advanced relay nodes, which possess both a relay function (network resource) and a processing function (computational and storage resources), are placed inside the network, and we propose an adaptive online lossless packet compression scheme utilized at these nodes. This scheme selectively compresses a packet according to its waiting time in the queue during congestion. Through preliminary investigation using actual traffic datasets, we investigate the compression ratio and processing time of packet-by-packet compression in actual network environments. Then, by means of computer simulations, we show that the proposed scheme reduces the packet delay time and discard rate and investigate factors necessary in achieving efficient packet relay.

A time-slicing ring oscillator (TSRO) which captures time-dependent delay degradation due to periodic transient voltage drop on a power supply network is proposed. An impact of the supply voltage fluctuations, including voltage drop and overshoot, on logic circuit delay is evaluated as a change of oscillation frequency. The TSRO is designed using standard logic cells so that it can be placed almost anywhere in a digital circuit wherein supply voltage fluctuation is concerned. We also propose a new procedure for reconstructing supply voltage waveform. The procedure enables us to accurately monitor time-dependent, effective supply voltages. The -1 dB bandwidth of the TSRO is simulated to be 15.7 GHz, and measured time resolution is 131 ps. Measurement results of a test chip using 90-nm standard CMOS process successfully proved the feasibility of both delay degradation and effective supply voltage fluctuation measurements. Measurement of spatial voltage drop fluctuation is achieved.

In this paper, a 10-Gb/s CMOS optical receiver analog front-end is designed and implemented in 0.13-µm CMOS technology. An optical receiver analog front-end includes a pre-amplifier and a post amplifier. To ensure 10-Gb/s operation, the effect of inherent photodiode parasitic capacitance should be suppressed. Thus, an advanced common-gate stage is exploited as the input stage of pre amplifier. To enhance the bandwidth without a passive inductor, a new post amplifier with active feedback and negative capacitance compensation techniques is proposed. A prototype chip has 98-dBΩ of trans-impedance gain (ZT), corresponding 40-dB input dynamic range (5-µA to 500-µA) and minimum allowable input current (5-µA). Also, the receiver achieves the bandwidth of 7.5-GHz for 0.25-pF photodiode parasitic capacitance, and the measured optical sensitivity equals -18-dBm for 10-12 bit error rate (BER).

In this paper, we propose an anonymous routing protocol, LOPP, to protect the originator's location privacy in Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN). The goals of our study are to minimize the originator's probability of being localized (Pl) and maximize the destination's probability of receiving the message (Pr). The idea of LOPP is to divide a sensitive message into k segments and send each of them to n different neighbors. Although message fragmentation could reduce the destination's probability to receive a complete message, LOPP can decrease the originator's Pl. We validate LOPP on a real-world human mobility dataset. The simulation results show that LOPP can decrease the originator's Pl by over 54% with only 5.7% decrease in destination's Pr. We address the physical localization issue of DTN, which was not studied in the literature.

Robot path-planning is one of the important issues in robotic navigation. This paper presents a novel robot path-planning approach based on the associative memory using Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Networks (SOINN). By the proposed method, an environment is first autonomously divided into a set of path-fragments by junctions. Each fragment is represented by a sequence of preliminarily generated common patterns (CPs). In an online manner, a robot regards the current path as the associative path-fragments, each connected by junctions. The reasoning technique is additionally proposed for decision making at each junction to speed up the exploration time. Distinct from other methods, our method does not ignore the important information about the regions between junctions (path-fragments). The resultant number of path-fragments is also less than other method. Evaluation is done via Webots physical 3D-simulated and real robot experiments, where only distance sensors are available. Results show that our method can represent the environment effectively; it enables the robot to solve the goal-oriented navigation problem in only one episode, which is actually less than that necessary for most of the Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methods. The running time is proved finite and scales well with the environment. The resultant number of path-fragments matches well to the environment.

In this paper we propose a file replication scheme inspired by a thermal diffusion phenomenon for storage load balancing in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks. The proposed scheme is designed such that the storage utilization ratios of peers will be uniform, in the same way that the temperature in a field becomes uniform in a thermal diffusion phenomenon. The proposed scheme creates replicas of files in peers probabilistically, where the probability is controlled by using parameters that can be used to find the trade-off between storage load balancing and search performance in unstructured P2P file sharing networks. First, we show through theoretical analysis that the statistical behavior of the storage load balancing controlled by the proposed scheme has an analogy with the thermal diffusion phenomenon. We then show through simulation that the proposed scheme not only has superior performance with respect to balancing the storage load among peers (the primary objective of the present proposal) but also allows the performance trade-off to be widely found. Finally, we qualitatively discuss a guideline for setting the parameter values in order to widely find the performance trade-off from the simulation results.

Due to the distributed nature, mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in distrusted communications. To achieve trusted communications, it is important to build trusted routes in routing algorithms in a self-organizing and decentralized fashion. This paper proposes a trusted routing to locate and to preserve trusted routes in MANETs. Instead of using a hard security mechanism, we employ a new dynamic trust mechanism based on multiple constraints and collaborative filtering. The dynamic trust mechanism can effectively evaluate the trust and obtain the precise trust value among nodes, and can also be integrated into existing routing protocols for MANETs, such as ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (AODV) and dynamic source routing (DSR). As an example, we present a trusted routing protocol, based on dynamic trust mechanism, by extending DSR, in which a node makes a routing decision based on the trust values on its neighboring nodes, and finally, establish a trusted route through the trust values of the nodes along the route in MANETs. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through extensive simulations.

In this paper, we address the on-demand end-to-end optical network construction problem for grid applications in new generation large-scale multi-domain wavelength switched optical networks (WSON). According to users' requests for high-performance distributed computing, groups of dedicated end-to-end lightpaths among geographically distributed grid resources can be established dynamically forming multiple-lightpath optical networks for grid applications, namely, optical grid network (OGN). To facilitate the automated OGN construction, we introduce an optical grid network infrastructure providing an integrated and self-contained OGN service to grid users with totally distributed control. In this infrastructure, for easy construction, especially in a large-scale multi-domain WSON environment, we propose an overlay approach to construct OGNs in a peer-to-peer fashion, which conceals the communication architecture of the underlying heterogeneous optical networks. In particular, we propose an adaptive construction mechanism that can develop the OGN flexibly by adapting to the dynamically changed optical network circumstance. To enable users to take the advantage of the end-to-end lightpaths of WSON directly, a wavelength-oriented end-host configuration scheme is proposed. Experimental results on a developed prototype and an optical-fibre test-bed network successfully validate the proposal.

This paper presents generating stable and sparse reluctance/inductance matrix from the inductance matrix which is extracted under insufficient discretization. To generate the sparse reluctance matrix with guaranteed stability, the original matrix has to be (strictly) diagonally dominant M matrix. Hence, the repeated inductance extractions with a smaller grid size are necessary in order to obtain the well-defined matrix. Alternatively, this paper provides some ideas for generating the sparse reluctance matrix, even if the extracted reluctance matrix is not diagonally dominant M matrix. These ease the extraction tasks greatly. Furthermore, the sparse inductance matrix is also generated by using double inverse methods. Since reluctance components are not still supported in SPICE-like simulators, generating the sparse inductance matrix is more useful than the sparse reluctance one.

Acquisition of accurate colors is important in the modern era of widespread exchange of electronic multimedia. The variety of device-dependent color spaces causes troubles with accurate color reproduction. In this paper we present the outlines of accomplished digital camera system with device-independent output formed from tristimulus XYZ values. The outstanding accuracy and fidelity of acquired color is achieved in our system by employing an embedded color calibration system based on emissive device generating reference calibration colors with user-defined spectral distribution and chromaticity coordinates. The system was tested by calibrating the camera using 24 reference colors spectrally reproduced from 24 color patches of the Macbeth Chart. The average color difference (CIEDE2000) has been found to be ΔE = 0.83, which is an outstanding result compared to commercially available digital cameras.

In this Letter, we explore semi-definite relaxation (SDR) program for finding the real roots of a real polynomial. By utilizing the square of the polynomial, the problem is approximated using the convex optimization framework and a real root is estimated from the corresponding minimum point. When there is only one real root, the proposed SDR method will give the exact solution. In case of multiple real roots, the resultant solution can be employed as an accurate initial guess for the iterative approach to get one of the real roots. Through factorization using the obtained root, the reminding real roots can then be solved in a sequential manner.

In network tomography, most work to date is based on exploiting probe packet level correlations to infer the link loss rates and delay distributions. Some other work focuses on identifying the congested links using uncorrelated end-to-end measurements and link prior probability of being congested. In their work, the prior probabilities are identified by the matrix inversion with a number of measurement snapshots, and the algorithm to find the congested links is heuristic and not optimal. In this letter, we present a new estimator for the prior probabilities that is computationally simple, being an explicit function of the measurement snapshots. With these prior probabilities, the identification of the congested link set is equivalent to finding the solution for a probability maximization problem. We propose a fast bottom-up approach named FBA to find the solution for this problem. The FBA optimizes the solution step by step from the bottom up. We prove that the solution by the FBA is optimal.

In this letter, we present a route discovery protocol for ad hoc multi-hop cellular networks which uses directional information towards the base station. The proposed protocol, based on the reactive approach, reduces flooding as much as possible. To quantify this, we analyze its performance in terms of how much progress it makes per hop and how much reduction in routing packet number it achieves per route discovery. The analytical, as well as simulation, results demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly reduces flooding overheads and finds a route to the base station in a robust manner.

In wireless sensor networks, preserving location privacy under successive inference attacks is extremely critical. Although this problem is NP-complete in general cases, we propose a dynamic programming based algorithm and prove it is optimal in special cases where the correlation only exists between p immediate adjacent observations.

The security of P2P networks depends on building trust management among peers. However, current trust management models focus on preventing untrustworthy resources from spreading by malicious providers, but have few effects on reducing denial-of-service attacks of malicious consumers and free riding of selfish peers. Pointing to these problems, a bi-evaluation trust management model, called BiTrust, is proposed. In this model, the trustworthiness of a peer is divided into service and request trustworthiness. Service trustworthiness shows the resources reliability of providers, and request trustworthiness is used to deal with requests from consumers, which can keep away malicious consumers and encourage selfish peers to share resources. A generic method for evaluating service and request trustworthiness is described. Furthermore, the implementation strategies of the model are also depicted in this paper. The following analysis and simulation show that BiTrust is more effective on enhancing high-quality resources sharing among peers and more advanced in successful exchanges rate.

This paper proposes a sensing system for a behavior detection system using an ultrasonic oscillosensor and an air pressure sensor. The ultrasonic oscillosensor sensor has a cylindrical tank filled with water. It detects the vibration of the target object from the signal reflected from the water surface. This sensor can detect a biological vibration by setting to the bottom bed frame. The air pressure sensor consists of a polypropylene sheet and an air pressure sensor, and detects the pressure information by setting under the bed's mattress. An increase (decrease) in the load placed on the bed is detected by the increase (decrease) in the pressure of the air held in the tube attached to the sheet. We propose a behavior detection system using both sensors, complementally. The system recognizes three states (nobody in bed, keeping quiet in bed, moving in bed) using both sensors, and we detect the behavior before getting out of bed by recognized these states. Fuzzy logic plays a primary role in the system. As the fundamental experiment, we applied the system to five healthy volunteers, the system successfully recognized three states, and detected the behavior before getting out of bed. As the clinical experiment, we applied the system to four elderly patients with dementia, the system exactly detected the behavior before getting out of the bed with enough time for medical care support.

This paper evaluates impact of self-heating in wire interconnection on signal propagation delay in an upcoming 32 nm process technology, using practical physical parameters. This paper examines a 64-bit data transmission model as one of the most heating cases. Experimental results show that the maximum wire temperature increase due to the self-heating appears in the case where the ratio of interconnect delay becomes largest compared to the driver delay. However, even in the most significant case which induces the maximum temperature rise of 11.0, the corresponding increase in the wire resistance is 1.99% and the resulting delay increase is only 1.15%, as for the assumed 32 nm process. A part of the impact reduction of wire self-heating on timing comes from the size-effect of nano-scale wires.